Nick Stone - Mr. Clarinet

He hit Little Haiti. The shops, the bars, the market, the clubs. He was the only white face there. No one bothered him, plenty of people spoke to him. He often thought he recognized faces he'd seen in Port-au-Prince and Pйtionville, but they were no one he'd met.

He ate dinner every night at a Haitian restaurant called Tap-Tap. The food was great, the service temperamental, the atmosphere warm and raucous. He sat at the same table-facing a noticeboard with a missing-persons poster of Charlie stuck in the middle.

He chewed over the case in his head. He went through it chronologically. He laid out the evidence. He added it up. Then he worked in other detail-background, history, people.

Something wasn't right.

There was something he hadn't seen, or something he'd overlooked, or something he wasn't meant to see.

But what, he didn't know.

It wasn't over.

He had to know what had happened to Charlie Carver.

DECEMBER 21: JOE called him just after eight a.m., to tell him they'd rescued Claudette Thodore and arrested Saxby. Saxby had started spilling his guts the minute they'd slapped the cuffs on him, trying to cut a deal with everyone from the arresting officer to the paramedic, promising to tell them about a private club in Miami and bodies dumped in the Everglades, in return for a reduced sentence.

Father Thodore was on his way to Fort Lauderdale to see his niece.

Joe asked Max what he was doing staying at the Radisson. Max couldn't think of anything remotely intelligent to say, so he told his friend the truth. To his surprise, Joe told him he knew where he was at and he should take all the time he needed. No sense in rushing into what he'd got the rest of his life to work out and get over.

They made arrangements to meet at The L Bar the next night. It was the first chance they'd had to meet since Max's return. Joe had been busy: Christmas always brought out the crazies.

Buy you a drink, lieutenant?" Max asked Joe's reflection in the booth window.

Joe stood up with his hand out, face a big ear-to-ear grin.

They hugged.

"You look good now, Max," Joe commented. "Not like you spent the last ten years hangin' upside down in a cave."

"You lost weight, Joe?" Max asked. Next to Vincent Paul, no man would ever be big again, but Joe had definitely lost more than just his place in Max's league table. His eyes were wider, there was a hint of cheekbone, a finer edge to his jaw, and his neck was somewhat slimmer.

"Yeah, dropped a few pounds."

They sat down. The barman came over. Max ordered a double Barbancourt rum neat, Joe the same with Coke.

The two old friends talked. It was easy and unhurried. They started small and built up to big. The drinks kept coming. Max told his whole story pretty much straight down the line, unraveling everything piece by piece, as it happened, and ending with Vincent Paul in Pйtionville. Joe said nothing the whole way through, but Max watched the light slowly dying out of his friend's expression as he gave a detailed account of what he'd discovered. He wanted to know what would happen to Gustav Carver.

"I guess he'll be turned over to some of the parents whose children he stole."

"Good. I hope they each gets a slice of him. One for every child," Joe growled. "I hate them motherfuckers man! Hate them!"

"What's happening with the organization?"

"The Florida perverts we can handle. We've put together a squad to take them down. That's happening in the next few days," Joe said. "The rest I'm in the process of giving to friends of mine in the other states. Feebs will get their piece too. It's gonna be a big job. Expect to be hearin' about this for a long while to come."

They clicked glasses.

"Now, I got somethin' for you. It isn't gonna be of no use now, but you asked for it so I brought it along anyway," Joe said, handing Max a brown envelope. "First up: Darwen Medd. He's dead."

"What? When?"

"April this year. Coast Guard boarded a boat from Haiti, looking for illegals. Found Medd in the cargo hold. Naked, hands and feet tied, tongue cut out, sealed in a barrel. Autopsy report said he'd been in there at least two months before they found him. Also said he was alive when they took his tongue, still alive when they sealed him up."

"Jesus!"

"This may not have been the same people who cut Clyde Beeson open. I did a little digging. When Medd went off to Haiti to work this case, he was on the verge of being arrested by the Feebs for drug trafficking. He was helping an ex-client of his bring stuff in from Venezuela. A lot of people I talked to think this was their work. The barrel had Venezuelan markings on it, and the boat had stopped off there before going to Haiti."

"How clean was the cut to his tongue?"

"Scalpel. Professional-well, except for the way they let him bleed."

Max took a long pull on his drink.

"Same person did Beeson," Max said.

"Not necessarily…" Joe began.

"What else you got?" Max cut in.

"Remember that evidence you couriered me? Print on that videotape helped us solve an old case."

"Yeah?"

"You remember before you went out there you asked me to look into the Carver family? The only thing I could find on file was a B amp;E on their house here, where nothing got taken but the burglar took a king-size dump on one of their fancy plates?" Joe laughed. "Get this-the prints the lab took off the videotape was the same as the prints they found on the turd plate."

"Yeah?"

"Uh-huh. Gets better-much better." Joe leaned closer, with a smile. "Now, we still don't have a file on the perp, just the match. Not here in the U.S. anyhow. If we'd bothered to run the plate prints with the Mounties we would've known exactly who The Turdman was."

"And…?"

"That other guy you asked me to look into-Boris Gaspйsie," Joe said.

Max felt his pulse quicken as a cold jolt passed down his spine.

"Tell me."

"Wanted for two homicides in Canada."

"What happened?"

"Boris must've been one of those Carver kids, 'cause he was adopted by this man, Jean-Albert Leboeuf, a surgeon. Leboeuf was also a pedophile. Went to Haiti all the time.

"Boris killed him when he was twelve. Stabbed him more than fifty times. They found pieces of the guy splashed all over the place. The kid had split him open from his neck to his guts. Real precise cuts too. He told the detectives who interviewed him that his so-called adoptive dad made him watch videotapes of his operations. Used to tell him that he'd do the same thing to him if he told anyone what was going on between them.

"Boris also told the cops his real last name was Gaspйsie, and that he'd been kidnapped and brainwashed in Haiti. They bought the first part, but not the second. The adoption papers were all in order.

"Court was real lenient on the kid. They put him in a hospital outside of Vancouver. He was there for about six months, doin' real well, no complaints, model patient. Then, one day, out of the blue he gets into a fight with one of the other kids in there. Witnesses say the kid pulled a knife on Boris and Boris defended himself. Only he over- defended himself, knowhumsayin'? Put his attacker in a coma.

"Boris gets put in the hospital's secure wing. He gets attacked again-only this time it's one of the staff-this male nurse who'd been on the job a month, goin' at him with a syringe full of adrenaline."

"Carver had sent people to kill Boris," Max said.

"That's what it looks like now, yeah. Back then, who knew? Only Boris, I guess, because the next thing that happened was he escaped, went on the run. They had a manhunt but they never found him."

"When did all of this happen?"

"Nineteen-seventy, seventy-one," Joe said.